[Now released] Restore MKV Format Support

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Removing MKV Format support has a negative impact on the workflow of people that work with broadcasting software like OBS. Restore MKV support. Having native support for MKVs, even if they don't edit well without generating proxies, saves me a ton of time that I'd otherwise have to spend remuxing/transcoding files.

[Jake_Sherlock]

I appologize if this is a duplicate from another post or comment. This is an 'in the meantime' thing. I've been following this for a long time now and only just discovered a very easy conversion process. OBS Studio under the File menu has Remux Recordings. Open that up, select your file and click Remux. It was that easy. And yes, the remux works in Premiere.

[Kris.S.]

VLC also has a remux option, FWIW.

I'm still uisng Premiere Pro for work because we have a creative cloud license, but for personal use I wound up switching to Davinci Resolve at the moment, which seems to support MKV at the time of typing this.

[DryreL]

Bring back MKV support please!!

[jackthegiantkiller]

So it's been almost a year since you told us this was being "actively" worked on. How much longer is this going to take? All I can assume at this point is that Adobe is still squabbling over licensing? Sure would be nice to see some of those "record profits" going towards improving the user experience vs investors pockets.

Also, where is Fergus these days? He stopped commenting in here entirely, but also hasn't commented in any forum since Nov 01, 2023.

[Hutch Harris]

Hi @Fergus H - would you mind pinning either my or @Jake_Sherlock's earlier posts with notes on how to remux in OBS? This thread shows up as a top result searching for how to use MKVs in Premiere, but the solve has wound up being a little buried. Repasting my post below. Thanks!

For anyone else using OBS, it actually comes with its own remux tool to convert your MKVs to MP4s extremely quickly without quality loss.
File > Remux Recordings - then pick your source & destination.

[ProfStringer]

I couldn't agree more with this feature request.  Adobe, it's long past time you brought back support for MKV.  

Our use case: we make video games.  We capture hours of footage via OBS for content creation, trailer footage, bug testing, and Games User Research.  Since OBS's support for m4v has a limitation that the entire recording must be completed before the video file is saved, MKV is the far-preferred format since it can write in chunks as it goes along, thereby reducing the risk of losing hours of recording footage upon a crash (just happened to me yesterday, in fact).

Your current workfow requires that we convert hours of footage from MKV to m4v via VLC before we can even injest the footage into premiere for editing.  This is absurd in this day and age (March 2024 as of this writing). 

PLEASE restore support for MKV into Premiere Pro.  We're begging you.

[jackthegiantkiller]

I really do not understand Adobe's silence on this, for a while we at least had a conversation going with Fergus and other team members and now we are back to the radio silence we received in their previous Uservoice. Can somebody, anybody at Adobe, deign to update us?

[Will..]

Premiere Pro STILL has the audio pop bug from imported .mp4 remuxxed OBS .mkv files!!!!! How is this still a thing? This has existed for years!! I've created another bug report in the past, and have mentioned it to Adobe directly via Twitter several times.

I'm tired of importing screen recordings from OBS and then the audio POPS at random places. I have confirmed it is PREMIERE causing it because if I close Premiere and open it up again, the pop sound goes away, then as I use Premiere, it will show up again in a new spot.

The issue wouldn't be so bad if Premiere didn't export the pop!!! If it exists during timeline playback, then it will render into the final export!!! It's something to do with audio cache files with Adobe. If it happens, I can even send it to Adobe Audition and see the pop in the waveform there, select it a heal it to remove it, then it goes away. Or if I simply tab out of Premiere and don't use it for a few minutes, if I tab back it, the pop will fix itself!!! Extremely frustrating because it's inconsistent.

I'm on Mac OS 13.6.3, but it also happened on Mac OS 12. I've used several versions of OBS as well. For some reason, Premiere doesn't like .mp4 files from OBS that were remuxxed from .mkv files. Not sure if this has to do with Premiere deciding to remove support of .mkv files and there's a bug happening somehow, but when they removed support of .mkv files, I was FORCED to remux files to .mp4 to edit my screen recordings! So in either scenario, the Adobe team created this problem for no reason. There's a giant thread with over a dozen pages of comments on this forum regarding bringing back .mkv support. It makes absolutely no sense why Adobe would even remove it in the first place!!! Media encoder can't even import the file!! It's a joke. The point of media encoder is to ENCODE MEDIA!! but it can't!!

Anyway, it's extremely frustrating that in the latest version of Premiere, this is STILL happening. Everything version of Premiere in the last 3-4 years has had this issue. FIX IT. Im sick of paying for a product that doesn't work, or at least stop taking away features like .mkv support that worked just fine.

Whoever is making these decisions at Adobe should not be in charge. These decisions are making the lives of paying customers WORSE

[RjL190365]

The problem here is with the way OBS rewraps things into MP4. Premiere Pro, as well as some other NLE programs, always get tripped up with OBS' MP4 container format regardless of whether you use MP4 to record or remux the video into.

Even worse, OBS' MP4 remuxer will always automatically use VFR (Variable Frame Rate) even on video that's been recorded with CFR (Constant Frame Rate) to begin with! That will cause edited videos to go way out of sync between the video and the audio tracks!

As a result, I would recommend using third-party software to transcode your video instead of relying solely on OBS' remuxer.

[Will..]

If there is an OBS crash after recording for a while, with .mkv files the file will still be saved up until the crash. With .mp4 files, you lose the entire recording if it crashes. This is why so many people use .mkv and why so many people want .mkv support back in Premiere Pro.

I just checked and it says .mp4 AND .mov will be unrecoverable if there's a crash. So this is not a solution. You haven't had any crashes? or are you getting around this with entering some sort of custom remux settings? Unfortunately, I've had 30minute plus recordings crash and lose the entire thing and have to redo it all.

[Will..]

Well, that's certaintly the case with remuxing the file with OBS, however, the problem still lies with Premiere removing support of .mkv files.

Needing to rely on third party software is ridiculous. What is the point of Media Encoder then? What is the point of paying several hundreds of dollars every year for what's suppose to be the best suite of video editing tools if it can't even help me encode a video file to something that Premiere Pro can use? Why are we spending time converting files because of Adobe removing support? .mkv videos worked perfect 4 years ago. No muxxing required. no converting required.

I've never had a problem with .OBS recordings up until Adobe choosing to remove support of .mkv which made my editing workflow significantly worse.

[R Neil Haugen]

Premiere doesn't do mkv, Resolve doesn't do ProRes RAW. Yep, they all have holes in their coverage.

[hectorblg]

I can't understand why Premiere doesn't support the popular file extension .mkv, which can be played and used by the extremely limited Windows Media Player. It's supposed to be the best video editor, but it can't handle a simple file. Now I must get an "amateur" video editor to handle the file. Terrible.

Mod note: The title was changed, and the discussion was moved to the Ideas forum.

[Ann Bens]

Correct, Premiere does not support MKV. You will have to convert if you want to use Premiere.

[hectorblg]

And pay $20 for a software that can do it, just because Premiere is limited. As a "professional" software it should be able to handle ALL files. Not good at all!

[Ann Bens]

Handbrake or Shutter Encoder are free.

MKV is just a wrapper. it's the codec inside that matters.

Could try and change mkv to avi.

[Clint W.]

July 2024 here.  How long exactly does it take to restore support for something that used to work?

The core scenario is "Adobe Premiere should accept content from any source its customers might be editing, which increasingly includes POPULAR applications such as OBS that default to .MKV over ProRes and traditional containers and codecs."

At a minimum, move support for things like this to an open source plug-in model and let us support it if you don't want to.

[Fergus H]

@Clint W.  I'm sorry that this is taking longer than we'd expected. Your core scenario is exactly how we also think of this: that Premiere Pro should be a Swiss Army knife when it comes to formats supports. While it is no excuse, I will say that this work involved entirely rewriting our MKV support and not just restoring what was already there. 

Regards,

Fergus

P.S. While we fully intend for MKV support to be delivered by Adobe and to be first class, it has always been possible for anyone to create OBS Importers and Exporters, using the Premiere Pro C++ SDK. The SDK isn't open source but developers can ship the plugins they create however they like.

[Remote Index]

"Your core scenario is exactly how we also think of this: that Premiere Pro should be a Swiss Army knife when it comes to formats supports"

Fergus H,

I'll leave this here for further reference:

 

(External Link)

R.

[Amoasei]

Half Year to add a codec support? Whats happening with adobe? Can I change to Resolve to take some features?

[lukesmith_oficial]

MKV is a format much used on videos. It's not a codec or anything, it1s a FORMAT, that is accepted in literally any other video editors softwares. How come Premiere still doesn't accept it? The price is not low, you know? We pay to use, and to be fair it's a fair price for everything that Premiere has. But it's time to accepted MKV already.

Lately I spend more time converting MKV videos then editing itself. It's being years of users complainting about that. That should be updated to accept it asap.

[Anonymous Frog]

Did you ever find a workaround? I've recently run into the same problem sometime late this last year and your description of the issue is the only one I can find that matches my experience exactly - popping is introduced randomly to OBS clips; audio recorded in Premiere is fine. Did you try avoiding the OBS remux with any success/recording to MP4 from the start instead of .mkv? This issue is driving me insane lol

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hello @Will..,

Sorry about the audio issue. I merged your post into the Idea to restore .mkv support. The team will need to support this container again to fix any bugs related to audio in that container. I hope that they do that soon. I apologize for the frustration.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hello @Anonymous Frog,

I advise you to transcode the material to avoid such issues. I'm sorry, but .mkv is not supported right now. Please upvote.

Thanks,
Kevin

[Anonymous Frog]

I am not trying to use mkv files in Premiere.

I record in .mkv with OBS and then remux the .mkv file to MP4. I can then import them into Premiere without issue, and I've done so for around a year. 

The problem is that as of the last few updates, Premiere now seems to add popping noises randomly to these specific recordings. I can't figure out why, or how to fix it. The user I replied to appears to have the exact same specific issue - I don't care about mkv support, I care about my audio tracks not having popping noises that aren't present in the source file.

Any help at all would be appreciated.